Lone wolf attacks hard to prevent but so are simplistic reactions

By Greg Barton

Friday's terrorist attack in Melbourne's Bourke Street was the sort of lone-actor attack that police have been fearing and training for ever since the rise of the Islamic State movement in 2014.

Such attacks are feared in large part because they are so difficult to predict and therefore prevent.

Hassan Khalif Shire Ali lunge at police with a knife before he was shot in the chest.

Attacks involving larger teams are often many months in the planning and involve extensive communication that authorities are increasingly able to detect and intercept.

Terrorism and radicalisation to violent extremism is almost always a social phenomenon. With most people it involves being drawn into becoming a member of a group that affirms them. Consequently, most lone-actor attacks involve a larger social network.

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Nevertheless, the perpetrator generally rushes into an attack with relatively little preparation or coordination, giving little chance of being detected.

Sadly this is now well understood because such attacks have become all too familiar. What is less well understood is why when the attackers are ‘known to authorities’ – as is the case with most lone-actors – they were not kept under surveillance.

In part the misunderstanding can be blamed on Hollywood.

Surveillance is much more difficult and much more resource-intensive in real life than the movies would suggest.

High-level surveillance requires three shifts of teams of ten or more and therefore can be undertaken only in most extreme circumstances.

What is also not generally well understood is that the workload of cases of "persons of interest" in connection with known terror networks has increased roughly tenfold since the emergence of IS.

And in the second concentric circle beyond this group of people of interest – which in Australia numbers many hundreds of individuals – are thousands more who have a peripheral connection.

This connection might be sufficient to warrant the cancelling of their passports when it is suspected that they intended to travel to join Islamic State in Syria, as was the case with Friday’s attacker. The threshold for doing this is very much lower than the threshold for arresting and laying charges.

Australia has hundreds of young men and women who, since 2014, have been stopped from departing Australia because of suspicions that they intended to join terrorist groups in the Middle East. Most of these are now in that second circle of persons of interest and there simply aren't the resources to actively monitor them on an ongoing basis.

A further source of confusion, in an age in which much ugly politicking has been conducted using shameless fear-mongering targeting vulnerable communities, is the belief that some communities, such as the Somali community, are rife with extremism. This is simply not true.

There is a limited problem with youth within the Somali diaspora being targeted by recruiters for terrorist networks like al-Shabaab, IS and al-Qaeda. But it is simply not the case that police and community leaders are failing to properly monitor dangerous individuals.

The reality is that the Somali community in Australia is made up mostly of people forced to flee their homeland because of violence associated with al-Shabaab. (With about 16,000 people, Somalis in Australia are a very small part of the 1 million plus global Somali diaspora.)

The radical Islamist terror group continues to be a threat 12 years after emerging in 2006 to dominate Somalia in the midst of civil war and seven years after it was driven out of controlling the capital Mogadishu in 2011.

The welcome reality is that radicals within the community, just like other criminal elements, are a tiny part of the community.

But perversely, the more that young people from the community experience prejudice and become alienated, the more vulnerable they are to recruitment into extremism.

In recent years the risk of diaspora youth being recruited to al-Shabaab has decreased as the community has rallied against the threat. But the rise of IS has seen many Somali youths around the world drawn to the conflict in Syria and Iraq.

And just as the defeat of al-Shabaab as a political force in Somalia saw it continue to ravage the country as an insurgency, so too IS continues to coordinate attacks within Iraq and Syria and to inspire attacks abroad.

The risk of terrorism, from whatever quarter – and the continued threat of right wing extremism in the United States is a reminder of future threats that may come to Australia – is not going away any time soon.

Authorities, working with communities have a real reasonable level of confidence about stopping large-scale elaborate attacks but it is exactly the sort of lone-actor attack that we saw on Friday that will continue to be the threat to come for the foreseeable future.

There are no easy answers but what is clear is that simplistic responses only increase the threats and hand to the terrorists a victory they should never be given.

Professor Greg Barton is a Research Professor in Global Islamic Politics at the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University.